The Wandering Village

The mechanics are punishing not because they're interesting, but purely because the game makes it a pain in the ass to manage things. There are no alerts for if your basic resource collectors (wood cutters, miners etc) have no resources in their vicinity. There are very few indicators at all of things needing to be managed despite the game also being incredibly annoying to navigate visually, so that you cannot see half of your town at any one time and zooming out for a wider look takes away your ability to click and manage things. The early game is just a race to try and get the Onbu infrastructure needed for it not to suddenly die e.g. from an early spawning poison event on the map, or as I just found out, random events that sap your Onbus health (the game never alerted me that Onbu's health was decreasing either! By the time I noticed, its health was irreversibly low and my run was ended). Again for the difficulty of navigation- resource and consumption tracking are very basic. Villager "need" is a nebulas stat and the game makes it quite unclear how you gain additional specifics on potential happiness increases from your many choices. The idea that my villagers would just get up and leave the Onbu is infuriating in itself- I'm in the ocean, where the hell are you gonna go? Mass plank walking because the game didn't ping me that all my farms on one side of the map stopped producing food because every tile is covered in compost for god knows what reason??? I love town building strategy games, but this game manages to do every aspect of it poorly compared to any other one I've played. Maybe it's because I play on hard mode? Maybe the game just needs major rebalancing/ increased management tools for hard mode, if it's been designed mostly for cozy play? I also find the game very unmotivating if the only aim is to complete the exact same town set-up and plan for the exact same mid-late game eventualities with very little variation. Even just adding the most basic of pings- if Onbu's health reaches 50%, if a resource collection point stops production, if villagers are homeless- would make this game far more enjoyable. In my opinion micro managing is not a problem- it's half of this genre and we enjoy it- it's making that micro managing involve an excruciating and tiring amount of vigilance and guess work paired with low visibility and low reward. TLDR: play if you like spending all your energy constantly checking things most other games in the genre give you pings for, and watch as your growing colony becomes a growing pain in the ass! And then your Onbu dies because by the time you've noticed the major problem for-which-there-is-no-ping there isn't enough time to research and build the solution. Sucks all the fun out of the challenge of the genre by being incredibly poorly built for the challenges of the genre.